A brief description of the work: a Dionysiac ((effeminate))
(((queer object of desire))) man clutches a tree,
Sighing as his body presses backwards and forwards against the trunk,
Peeling off a loincloth that’s meant to hide his penis,
As arrows penetrate and fissure his toned abdomen.

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I dislike the idea that art is dying, with its conservative dog-whistling against social progression.

(Whatever these words, ‘progression’, ‘conservative’, ‘art’ even
mean. I tend to think that the supposed core underneath these nouns is another
mask, which is itself an art form (rhetoric), dependent on an ignorance of the
cyclical. But here, I have to accept and tell the reader, that these crude terms are
sadly necessary to keep me in the realm of art. Writing of what I feel and think,
for I think within these rhetorical flaws. If I were to break my thoughts by
crushing their ends into hot goo, I would simply be writing a sociology essay, so
I will stay within my thoughts for simplicities’ sake.)

Yet, I do think visual art is suffering from a change in reception that is by no fault of the audience or even the bankers who implore Banksy for limitless capital. Each gallery with their acronymous labels for the minimalistic aesthetic, displays different pieces, but the experience of walking into a bleached white building and placing your foot behind a line. Neatly cutting you from being with art. Is the same.

There is a very clear distinction between what’s real, the viewer, and what’s fake, the object.

I normally complain to my art student partner that the minuscule descriptions at the side mean nothing to me without knowledge of fabrics or paint strokes.
They reply it also means fuck all to them.
I say let’s get an audio guide,
They say it costs £5 and I owe them lunch…

I never assumed that Da Vinci’s paintings, which hang in millions of rooms as decorative postcards, were inseminated outside a sterile environment.

In the past, art was an organ within an inter-dimensional body.
First entered through a corporeal stone body, structural art, enshrined by incense, perfumery, and kissed into emotion by music.

So, I imagine seeing art was inherently divine.

An experience untouched by words.

Guido Reni’s St Sebastian.

I saw the piece at first on Instagram, then tracked one of its locations to The Louvre, and

Fell in worship in front of a lifeless object for the first time.

Reni felt a compulsion to paint St Sebastian forty-nine times. Is this mass production the eighth cardinal sin – I doubt the countess who asked for a copy of Sebastian without his loincloth thought that more readily accessible materials were causing a decline of artistic freedom.

How pathological to give yourself entirely to one saviour who will never leave and then to reject his triumph above mortality, foreclosing the believer’s out of your work, to paint the point where consciousness fragments, spatters, flops like a poor rabbit’s wounded ear. Imagine the irony of…

In the middle of a chapel,

symbol of human restraint,

sits a painting of silent fanatical devotion.

In the middle of a gallery,

where I start to examine the crowd and wonder if it is just me who wishes I
was a ghost haunting the scullery so at least the paintings could become an opus of living,

rests the end of my pilgrimage to decadent pain.

Together, Sebastian and I both become subjects.

We both play as the martyr (wink wink, nudge nudge).

Somewhere inside me, an encrypted hemisphere whispers:

If one was made to die for living, then it must be done beautifully.

At least then, you could tease a small applause out of emotionally castrated critics before they tighten the noose.

Placing Sebastian as an executioner who psychoanalyses my dreams, waiting for a confession to slip.

Edging my head over the guillotine block, caught between two wooden death objects, here I let my neck fall between Sebastian’s thighs, and become blind. Oblivious to the signs and suggestive positions painted to contain meaning.

I’m simply an object. Tube fed an instructive urge to love and love to accept, for one must love thy enemies, my desire to be killed.

But whether because I love death or I’m an object injected with the politics of experience, I always rise above the ground.
I was sixteen when after one of my many resurrections, I was told it’s all over now. I missed the day of judgement,
 (no one else noticed it)
and now it’s decided that love is love. A single unity ending in marriage before vanishing off the known edge, like a rusting satellite that slipped off our radar without a beeping farewell.

I can be the first generation to say, ‘I think Sebastian is a twink’ as long as I can accept a-

“No, he was a homoerotic figure” (implied sexual attraction /= queer love)

But ask why was a minor saint their figure. Reni’s painting is more than a man depicted erotically, what a straight explanation, no Sebastian is an experience of queerness, not just an object of one.

Apparently, many think having the same legal rights means that centuries of anonymous proclivities are wiped clean, so then why am I stuck performing some social subversion with no context or applause?

I might see sweet Sebastian twenty years on and wait behind some white man taking a picture. He’ll be content to plough through lobotomised art because this is his regained land.

Recently a chairman pulled up a seat for him. Boasting at how he is nothing like his father, who shouted faggot to business failures, exploited miners, signed CIA documents to introduce crack to black neighbourhoods. But he only exploits Chinese factory workers and would never say fa…

No he’s better. He intuits any man can be the best worker.

And so my double takes his seat, shuts the door on black queers who fought for him, neatens his tie, and brushes off Sebastian as little more than an old playboy. Forgetting that this representation is reductive. Another layer of silencing.

Sebastian was a renowned saint of plagues when homosexuality was a Victorian illness. His eyes pray for more [redacted] pain.

He’s an echo for the eternal burning in my brain.

So, what I’m saying enfolds an analogy of art and queerness.

Art is the entanglement of the real, and what we wish would become the symbolically real. You don’t need to see the painting to understand because art is an experience that highlights an uncanny cognitive turn of your brain.

Queerness is not an action, nor was it always or should be an identity, but an experience that forever lingers and intersects.

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A brief description of Sebastian: an androgyne ((unsavoury male))
(((threatening homosexual))) is left alone,
Waiting for his mutating organs to fall onto leaves.
Maybe his ribs start to shiver, breaking against his thinning elastic skin, wondering when did
clouds start looking so naive.
He thinks of how he fell asleep last night hoping dogs would bleed the soil demanding
divine justice.
Yet maybe now he feels hanging his naked perversity in nature was an inevitable sacrifice, and

He will take it as a symbol of freed, alternative beauty.

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Francis Keaton is a Neo-Victorian transfag, located in London, and can be conacted via Instagram @francis.keaton and on Twitter @venus_as_a_boy3.